Textual Curation

Krista Kennedy

Description

A study of the roles community, financial support, texts, information structures, interfaces, and technology play in collaborative works

Wikipedia is arguably the most famous collaboratively written text of our time, but few know that nearly three hundred years ago Ephraim Chambers proposed an encyclopedia written by a wide range of contributors—from illiterate craftspeople to titled gentry. Chambers wrote that incorporating information submitted by the public would considerably strengthen the second edition of his well-received Cyclopædia, which relied on previously published information. In Textual Curation, Krista Kennedy examines the editing and production histories of the Cyclopædia and Wikipedia, the ramifications of robot-written texts, and the issues of intellectual property theory and credit. Kennedy also documents the evolution of both encyclopedias as well as the participation of central players in discussions about the influence of technology and collaboration in early modern and contemporary culture.

Through this comparative study, based on extensive archival research and data-driven analysis, Kennedy illuminates the deeply situated nature of authorship, which is dependent on cultural approval and stable funding sources as much as it is on original genius and the ownership of intellectual property. Kennedy's work significantly revises long-held notions of authorial agency and autonomy, establishing the continuity of new writing projects such as wikis with longstanding authorial practices that she calls textual curation.

This study examines a wide range of texts that recompose accepted knowledge into reliable, complex reference works combining contributions of article text alongside less commonly considered elements such as metadata vocabularies, cross-indexing, and the development of print and digital interfaces. Comparison of analog and networked texts also lays bare the impact of technological developments, both in the composing process and in the topics that can practically be included in such a text. By examining the human and technological curators that support these encyclopedias as well as the discourses that surround them, Kennedy develops textual curation as a longstanding theory and process that offers a nuanced construction of authorship.

Sujets

• Authorship
• Writting
• Disciplines
• Encyclopedias
• Language Arts
• Wikinomía
• Andrew Lih
• Wikinomics
• Lexicon Technicum
• Ephraim
• J. C. R. Licklider
• Writing
• Semantics
• Rhetoric
• Encyclopedia
• Author
• Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider
• Memex
• Bomis
• Richard Stallman
• Nupedia

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 01 novembre 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781611177107
• Langue: English

Extrait

Textual Curation
STUDIES IN RHETORIC/COMMUNICATION
Thomas W. Benson, Series Editor
TEXTUAL CURATION
Authorship, Agency, and Technology in Wikipedia and Chambers s Cyclop dia
Krista Kennedy
2016 University of South Carolina
Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN 978-1-61117-709-1 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-61117-710-7 (ebook)
For Jimmy Lee and Cheryl Kennedy
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Series Editor s Preface
Acknowledgments
Note on Styles and Conventions
Introduction
CHAPTER 1
Distributed Curatorial Practices
CHAPTER 2
Crowdfunding Curation
CHAPTER 3
Metaphors of Curation
CHAPTER 4
Content Contributors, Vandals, and the Ontology of Curation
CHAPTER 5
Production Collectives: Page and Screen
CHAPTER 6
Automated Curation
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
Figures
2014 banner appeal displayed at the top of articles
Article growth since creation, sampled at two-year intervals
Deletion and replacement of text in the Trigonometry article with misinformation
Chambers s taxonomy of knowledge
The front page of a Wikipedia article, with page tabs at the top
The Editing interface of a Wikipedia article
Wikipedia s Visual Editor interface
Wikipedia s Page Curation toolbar
Curation badge
Articulated process of design, deployment, performance, and either shutoff or recursion
Emergency robot shutoff button for RussBot
Primary text of Wikipedia article on Darwin, Minnesota
Discussion page for Darwin, Minnesota, article
Tables
Comparison showing stability of article word count (length), along with total edits
Parallel comparison of the iterations of the Minerals article
SERIES EDITOR S PREFACE
We are informed, should we happen to inquire in a search at the open online reference Wikipedia , that in 1728 Ephraim Chambers published his Cyclopedia: or, an Universal Dictionary of Arts and Sciences. Wikipedia was founded in 2001, almost three hundred years after the first publication of Chambers s Cyclopedia , and it might well be thought that everything had changed, and yet, as Krista Kennedy tells us, there are intriguing similarities in the two enterprises. We can look up the Cyclopedia in Wikipedia; Kennedy shows us that we can also find Wikipedia in Chambers s Cyclopedia .
In Textual Curation , Kennedy explores how the two encyclopedia projects were conceived, composed, and curated. In her meticulous and wide-ranging historical and critical study of the rhetoric and technology of authorship, composition, and curation, Kennedy, whose account is based on deep archival research, an extensive theoretical grasp, and close analysis of historical and cultural understandings driving both projects, gives us new ways of thinking about the encyclopedic project and about authorship itself. This volume is full of fresh insights, critical re-imaginings, and new integrations of a range of scholarly conversations. Every one of us who has ever used Wikipedia , or advised a student how to use (or how not to use) it, will find in Textual Curation an illuminating reading experience.
Thomas W. Benson
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
As is appropriate for a book on distributed composing practices, this work is the product of many conversations and many voices. Hundreds of textual curators, both known and unknown, contributed to the texts studied here. I am grateful that they devoted time, expertise, energy, and funding to encyclopedia building and to creating publicly available resources. Ephraim Chambers took great care in his considerations of curating encyclopedic projects and yet managed to include flashes of his own unique perspective and wit within technical texts. Nearly three hundred years after the first edition, it is still a pleasure to study his books.
This project began as a dissertation, and I am grateful to readers at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, who encouraged my work: Laura Gurak, John Logie, Richard Graff, and Michael Hancher. Thanks are owed to all my colleagues in the Department of Writing Studies, Rhetoric, and Composition at Syracuse University, most especially my research mentor, Lois Agnew, and Rebecca Moore Howard, both of whom provided extensive feedback, as well as Collin Brooke, Eileen Schell, and Steve Parks. I am thankful for the time and energy they devoted to reading drafts and proposals, offering advice, and creating an amazingly collegial place to work. The College of Arts and Sciences at Syracuse University generously supported research and production for this study, and Deans George Langford and Karin Ruhlandt supported release time to complete the manuscript.
Students in my graduate seminars on Authorship and Rhetorics of Craft in the Syracuse University Composition and Cultural Rhetorics Program provided helpful contemplation and feedback. Jana Rosinski and Justin Lewis were always good for intensive discussions on nonhuman agency, rhetorical invention, and information structures. Seth Long has been an outstanding research assistant with an incredible eye for detail. His thinking on data analysis and visualization has enriched my own. Kurt Stavenhagen, our program s resident beekeeper, generously shared his extensive knowledge on honeybees and apiaries. Communication and Rhetorical Studies graduate student Albert Rintrona enthusiastically shared his expertise on Japanese language and culture.
This research would not be possible without the knowledge and skill of a number of librarians, special collections specialists, and archivists. Patrick Williams, our departmental liaison librarian at Syracuse University s Bird Library, was immensely helpful. In London Susan Snell and Martin Cherry at the United Grand Lodge of England archives went out of their way to make me feel welcome and to direct my attention to rare resources. I also benefited from the expertise of Andrew Mussell at Gray s Inn, Naomi van Loo at the New College of Oxford University, Joanna Corden at the Royal Society, and the brilliant desk librarians at the Bodleian Special Collections and Lower Reserve Reading Rooms as well as at the British Library. The Royal Society of London s Sackler Foundation Archive of biographical data has been a vital resource for tracing information on the subscribers who supported the Cyclop dia s 1728 edition. The James Ford Bell Library at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, provided access to a rare hard copy of the Cyclop dia , and I also relied on open-access, searchable editions produced by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Digital Collections History of Science and Technology Collection and by the Project for American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language (ARTFL) at the University of Chicago s Division of the Humanities.
For professional encouragement and inspiration, I thank Jonathan Alexander, Joshua Gunn, Debra Hawhee, Michelle Kennerly, Andrea Lunsford, Michael Neal, Kendall Phillips, Andrew Pink, Scott Rogers, and Brad Vivian. Thanks also to my many friends and colleagues who enthusiastically discussed swarms in popular culture and recommended relevant media artifacts. I am grateful to Kristine Blair, C cile R vauger, Kelly Ritter, Michelle Smith, and Barbara Warnick for publishing early versions of some of this research. The National Council of Teachers of English granted permission to reprint in chapter 2 much of my article The Bee and the Daw: Situating Metaphors for Originality and Authorial Labor in the 1728 Chambers s Cyclop dia , which appears in College English 76.1 (2013): 35-58. Waveland Press in Long Grove, Illinois, granted permission to reprint in chapter 6 portions of Textual Machinery: Authorial Agency and Bot-Written Texts in Wikipedia, which appeared in The Responsibilities of Rhetoric (2009), 303-9. Aspects of this research also appear in an article entitled Textual Curation, published in Computers and Composition 40 (June 2016): 175-189. They are reprinted here by kind permission of Elsevier..
The University of South Carolina Press and its staff have been absolutely outstanding to work with. I am grateful to Thomas Benson for his support of this project. Thanks are also especially offered to Jim Denton, Linda Fogle, Suzanne Axland, and Elizabeth Jones for their unfailing collegiality, patience, and ability to keep the trains running on time. Two anonymous reviewers of the book manuscript offered extensive suggestions that have significantly improved it, and I am indebted for their time and consideration.
Here in the Syracuse University Writing Department, George Rhinehart has provided invaluable technological assistance and made me laugh constantly. He, Kristi Johnson, and the rest of our remarkable staff have offered tremendous help with navigating the pragmatic details of daily academic business. Janine Jarvis, Kristen Krause, Martha Love, Chris Palmer, LouAnn Payne, Faith Plvan, and Beth Wagner, you are the best at what you do.
The University of Minnesota s Ph.D. Program in Rhetoric and Scientific and Technical Communication on the St. Paul campus fostered a remarkable community. Paul Anheier, Anthony Arrigo, T. Kenny Fountain, Marnie Gamble, Dave Kmiec, Zoe Nyssa, Merry Rendahl, and Erin Wais-Hennen, I am thinking of you. In particular Dawn Armfield, Amy Propen, and Jessica Reyman can always be counted on for incredible encouragement and challenging discussions on authorship, agency, technology, and digital texts. I